


green sea waves

by hellodeer



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Magical Realism, OC death, Suicide Attempt, references to death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 14:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17489723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellodeer/pseuds/hellodeer
Summary: Leo has never cried in his life. It's a family thing, you see.





	green sea waves

**Author's Note:**

> this is my fic for the Born to Make (Art) History zine! it's heavily inspired by Cien Años de Soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez & latin-american magical realism in general :)

Many years later as he cried in front of his friend, Leo de la Iglesia was to remember that distant afternoon when his grandmother told him about the church.

It was a hot, dry summer day in California. Leo, at the height of his six years of age, spent it skating at the club and not paying much attention to his coach’s endless talking, focusing instead on the older boys and girls. He watched a national junior champion jump a triple Lutz, tried to imitate her and fell, leaving blood and sweat on the ice as he busted his lip open.

"Are you alright?" his coach asked.

It hurt, but he didn’t cry as she helped him up, nor as he changed into his sneakers, or as he waited for his grandmother to arrive, or as they got on the bus to the hospital.

Grandmother offered him a hand towel she had brought from Mexico and carried whenever she went. At that time, she was already the oldest person Leo had ever met. No one knew how old she actually was, not even her children, but with her hunched back and face full of wrinkles she looked at least a hundred years old. Her brown skin was like crumpled paper, and Leo always thought that if she stood too long under the sun or fell victim to a strong gust of wind she would crumble into dust. While the bus rolled around Los Angeles, she turned to Leo and said “Escúchame, mijo,” in a voice as strong as her body was fragile. “¿Sabes por qué nos llamamos de la Iglesia?”

Leo learned that afternoon, in the midst of the embarrassment and shame that came when grandmother spoke Spanish in public, that it was because his grandmother’s grandmother, Dolores, came to a small fishing village in Mexico as an orphan with no last name. Since she was cared for by the priest and his helper in the church, the village folk started calling her Dolores de la Iglesia. She was a happy child, if clumsy and with a tendency to wander too far away from the limits of the village at times, that grew into a beautiful and well-mannered young lady. Suitors came from all the neighboring villages and towns. On one occasion, the son of a doctor from the capital of the province came to ask for her hand in marriage, as news of her beauty and grace traveled far and wide. This young man she turned down, and all the other young men too. No one in the village could understand why until one day one of the churchgoers noticed Dolores’s belly looked swollen like a balloon.

It came as a shock to the village folk. Dolores had to confine herself to the church, because the men of the village began to stare at her like they would a piece of meat and the women turned their faces away in disgust when she walked by. She wasn’t seen for three months, until one rainy night in August when the whole village heard her screams and rushed to the church to see Dolores, sweaty and tired, holding a baby girl in her arms. The child was born silent and they all thought her dead until she opened her mouth in a big yawn, exposing toothless gums and a purple tongue. Dolores named her Perla. The child’s birth piqued the curiosity of those gathered about, who wanted to know who the father was. But Dolores wouldn’t tell, and it was only after much nagging from the women and slapping from the men that the priest’s helper finally told them that the father of the child was the priest himself.

The people rioted. Dolores only had time to lay the child inside her small wooden crib and hide her behind a tapestry before they got to her. Dolores and the priest were dragged to the sea and drowned, their bodies sunk with rocks to be eaten by the fish. A few minutes later the same sea invaded the village and drowned everyone, flooded houses and stores and the church. The child was found a couple of days later, floating down a river near the capital, safe and sound inside her crib.

"Ella tenía ojos verdes como el mar," grandmother said.

She had green eyes too, and so did Leo’s mother, who met them in the ER waiting room after her second job. Both women squeezed his hands and grandmother hummed a song as the doctor stitched his upper lip. It hurt, but he still didn’t cry. 

He didn’t cry at grandmother’s funeral either. His mom, aunts, uncles and cousins didn’t cry, because no one in their family had cried in generations, so the whole affair was quick, quiet and dry. Leo went back to training a couple of days later, dirty and smelly because he couldn’t go inside the only bathroom in the house, where grandmother had slipped and drowned in the tub. His coach tried to shoo him off the rink, told him to take a few more days and gave him the number of a well-known sports psychologist, but Leo didn’t listen to her. Guang Hong Ji, Leo’s friend from China who was spending the week in Los Angeles training with Leo’s coach for his junior debut, hugged him for a full minute after their practice.

Guang Hong Ji was thirteen. Leo himself was fifteen, preparing for his first senior season in the heat of July, staying at the rink from the moment it opened until the minute it closed. “You’re overworking yourself,” his coach said. “I’m sorry,” Guang Hong Ji said. “Come home,” his mother said. Except Leo couldn’t come home, where his mother sat with her pregnant belly and her sadness and her green eyes that were just like grandmother’s. So he skated, feeling the ice under his feet solid and grounding, feeling the air rushing past him as he spun or jumped. After practice he went to the beach, where the sea was inviting and filled with memories and the sand was cold. Guang Hong Ji tagged along once, well into the night, the moon full and high and white in the dark sky. He dipped his toes into the water but Leo went into the ocean, fully-clothed, until he was waist-deep and couldn’t hear Guang Hong Ji calling his name over the sound of the waves crashing. 

Guang Hong Ji saw Leo dive into the water and surface like a dolphin a couple of times, but then Leo went under and didn’t come up again for one, three, five minutes. Guang Hong Ji couldn’t swim and the beach was desert, all quiet save for the roaring of the ocean, louder than thunder, so his only alternative was to grab his phone and call the police. Just as he was about to dial 911 and use his broken English to try and explain his friend had drowned, Leo’s head emerged from the water and he walked slowly to the sand, until he was right in front of Guang Hong Ji.

"You okay?" he asked, trembling from fear and cold.

"Of course," Leo answered.

They never spoke of it again.

Guang Hong Ji slept at Leo’s house that night, instead of his hotel room. Leo’s mom, six months pregnant and awake at two A.M., waiting for her son, heated up a microwaved dinner that Leo didn’t eat, but Guang Hong Ji did. Leo prepared the air mattress in his bedroom, next to his bed, and brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink. When Guang Hong Ji finished his nighttime routine and quietly entered the bedroom, the lights were still on and Leo was curled up in bed, only the top of his head visible above the covers. Guang Hong Ji noticed a framed picture in the nightstand, of Leo and his mother, maybe two or three years younger, with an old lady with kind, large green eyes. “Your grandmother?”, he asked, but Leo didn’t answer.

Leo’s birthday was five days later. He turned sixteen with cake and gifts from the people at the rink, coaches and skaters and staff and security, who gathered around the small table in the small break room to sing _Happy Birthday_ and cheer. Then they were all gone, until it was just Leo and the dilacerated remains of the strawberry cake and Guang Hong Ji, who gave him a folded piece of paper.

"Happy birthday," he said.

Leo unfolded it to find a drawing of his grandmother, pictured in her favorite floral dress, waving both hands like she always did, her face wrinkled and smiling, colored to her exact skin tone, her eyes reflecting the sea. Leo stared at it for long minutes, unmoving, and didn’t notice he had started crying until Guang Hong Ji handed him a tissue.

It was a weird sensation. Leo had seen people cry countless times, had asked them about it and read up on it and even tried doing it himself a few times, to no avail. He had eventually given up and accepted the fact that he was to live a tearless life, like his grandmother had, so it came as a shock when it happened. And as the hot, wet and salty droplets fell from his eyes, he suddenly remembered the bus ride to the hospital when he first heard the story of his family. The tears turned into full sobs that shook his body and burned his eyes and hurt his lungs and left him thirsty and empty after it was over.

It was like opening a dam. If up until then Leo had never cried, after the first time he couldn’t seem to stop. He cried over everything: over the birds singing outside his window in the morning, over the ants in the sugar pot, over small children struggling to tie the laces on their skates, over American pop music playing on the radio. And he cried everywhere: on the bus to the rink, at the hole-in-the-wall deli where he ate his lunch, in the locker room, on the sidewalk while he waited to cross the street. On a particularly sunny Saturday afternoon he filled his neighbor’s medium-sized pool with his uncontrollable tears, an event which attracted children and curious bystanders from the whole block.

It wasn’t pleasant. The blurry vision made it impossible to see the people around him on the rink, his clothes were continuously wet and the dehydration gave him horrible headaches. Leo wished he could stop, but he didn’t know how and didn’t have anybody to ask.

He still couldn’t use the bathroom. He showered and defecated at the club, brushed his teeth in the kitchen, and when he woke up in the morning or the middle of the night with the urge to urinate, he did it in the bushes behind the house and told his mother it had been a stray dog. But a couple of months after his birthday he was crying again, this time because he had accidentally scratched his pregnant mother earlier when she handed him a clean plate to dry. His nails were long and dirty and disgusting, and if he didn’t cut them the world might as well end. The nail clipper was in the bathroom, though, where grandmother had slipped and drowned in the tub. But his tears were so abundant and the need to clip his nails so strong that he ventured into the bathroom. 

He found them in the cupboard under the sink. Just as he was about the leave the bathroom, a glimpse on the tile near the shower head caught his attention. Leo didn’t want to, but his eyes were drawn to the bathtub. It was dry and empty save for the spiders and their webs, but he could see grandmother’s still body under the clear water, her eyes open but unseeing. He had found her like that — wet and cold with skin green like her eyes, green like the sea — after she didn’t show up at the rink to pick him up and his coach had to give him a ride home. He sat on the edge of the tub and looked at her, both of them unmoving, until his mother got home from her third job.

He went back to his bedroom. Hung his clothes in the closet, tidied up his desk and made his bed, where he then sat and clipped his nails into the trash can. After that, he grabbed the razor he had also gotten from the bathroom and sliced open his wrists, wincing minutely at the pain. A trickle of water dripped from the cuts to the floor, came out under the door, crossed the living room, where it zigzagged around the furniture, continued on in a straight line across the kitchen, missed the crack on the floor just inside the door, and came in the backyard, where Leo’s mother was singing a soft Spanish lullaby to the child inside her belly.

"Holy mother of God!" she shouted.

Leo woke up in the hospital three days later to his mother crying above him, her tears falling on his forehead. His wrists had been stitched up and bandaged, though they were still wet, the bandages soggy and green.

"It’s okay," he told her. "I’m okay."

But that did not appease her. She kept crying and crying, every hour of every day, for the whole week he was in the hospital. Leo only cried twice, first when a nurse told him they’d run out of red jello so he would have to eat the yellow one, and then when his coach went to visit him and he agreed to see a psychiatrist. Both of them cried.

Guang Hong Ji sent him a text that contained all the possible heart emojis and a text that was a really sweet, heartfelt _get well soon_ wish in suspiciously good English. Leo remembered Guang Hong Ji had been there the day he went into the sea, where he stayed for long minutes watching the fishes and hearing grandmother’s humming all around him. “¿Sabes por qué nos llamamos de la Iglesia?”, her voice asked, and he gave her back the story she had once told him, reciting it in Spanish too, his embarrassment and shame of the language long gone. He expected her to say something more, but she didn’t, so he went back to the beach. He was under the sea after he cut his wrists, too, and for a moment he thought death was the ocean in front of him, open and dark and endless, until grandmother’s voice asked the question again and he answered her again.

"Bueno," she added this time. "La iglesia está emergiendo."

He was released after getting the clear from the hospital psychiatrist and instructions from the doctors on how to change the bandages and keep them clean. But since his mother’s tears flowed like a river and she was almost nine months pregnant, it was Leo’s job to take care of her too. At home, between cooking her dinner and dumping the bucket overflowing with tears that sat next to her bed in the backyard, Leo remembered and hummed the song grandmother used to hum. After much digging online and a call to his oldest uncle, he found out it was an old, sad Mexican song about a sailor who died in the green sea waves. His uncle also told him of the news he’d heard from a distant cousin back in Mexico, about how a small fishing village had recently emerged after years of being underwater. The roof of an ancient, decaying church had been the first thing to appear.

His search on the internet introduced him to all kinds of music and musicians. From American hip-hop to Portuguese fado to Indian filmi, there were so many beats and beautiful voices and styles that Leo suddenly didn’t feel like dying anymore. He wanted to spend the rest of his life listening to music instead, one new song every day until it was time to actually drown like his grandmother and her grandmother. He decided to learn the guitar, which was what he was doing, clumsily picking his way through a Chinese children’s song that Guang Hong Ji had sent him, along with one Korean and two American songs, when his mother screamed. Leo ran to the living room to find her dissolving.

"My water broke," she said.

They rushed to the hospital. She cried while they waited for the taxi, cried in the taxi, cried while the nurses settled her into her room, cried during the whole fourteen hours of labor. “I’m scared,” she told him in between sobs. “I’m scared the baby will be like us.”

"Don’t worry," Leo smiled. "She’ll be different."

He repeated it in Spanish, over and over, while his mother breathed heavily through the contractions and while she screamed and pushed the baby out, over and over, until the little girl was finally born. She cried so loud it could be heard from all over Los Angeles, her tiny fists waving around at the nurses and doctors like she wanted a fight. She was still crying after they cut her cord and laid her on her mother’s chest, and she only calmed down when Leo put a hand on her back and started softly humming the old Mexican song. 

"Her name is Perla," their mother said.

She wasn’t crying anymore, like the exhaustion of bringing her daughter into the world had drained all the water out of her. Her skin glistened with sweat and tears, both from herself and the baby girl.

Leo continued to hum the old Mexican song.

Perla opened her eyes and they were green like the sea on a clear summer day. The traffic from outside sounded like waves crashing on the shore.

**Author's Note:**

> the Born to Make (Art) History zine is seriously one of the prettiest zines i've ever seen, and i'm lucky to have been a part of it! learn more about it [here](https://borntomakearthistoryzine.tumblr.com)!!!!
> 
> as always, thanks to @DuendeJunior for beta-ing <3


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